“I have a rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of my friends.”
— Ernest Hemingway
“The English talked with inflected phrases. One phrase to mean everything.”
“Wars are Spinach. Life in general is the tough part. In war all you have to do is not worry and know how to read a map and co-ordinates.”
“But in the night he woke and held her tight as though she were all of life and it was being taken from him. He held her feeling she was all of life there was and it was true.”
“If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.”
“Something, or something awful or something wonderful was certain to happen on every day in this part of Africa.”
“It is impossible to believe the emotional and spiritual intensity and pure, classic beauty that can be produced by a man, an animal, and a piece of scarlet serge draped over a stick.”
“I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.”
“If you’re looking for messages, try Western Union.”
“My training was never to drink after dinner nor before I wrote nor while I was writing.”
“As in no other form of lute or combat, the conditions are such; the winner takes nothing, neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notion of glory, nor if he wins far enough, will he find anything within himself.”
“The old man looked at him with his sun-burned, confident loving eyes.”
“All bad writers are in love with the epic.”
“Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.”
“Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. Not even in the newspapers.”
“I felt very lonely when they were all there.”
“Shooting gives me a good feeling. It is faster than baseball and you are out on one strike.”
“I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.”
“He had loved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out.”
“It was strange how easy being tired enough made it.”
“A big lie is more plausible than truth.”
“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.”
“In stating as fully as I could how things really were, it was often very difficult and I wrote awkwardly and the awkwardness is what they called my style. All mistakes and awkwardness are easy to see, and they called it style.”
“Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.”
“No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.”
“He was violating the second rule of the two rules for getting on well with people that speak Spanish; give the men tobacco and leave the women alone.”
“You never kill anyone you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.”
“He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget. But I did not know that then, although I learned it later.”
“I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking a beer.”
“Why must all of the operations in life be performed without an anesthetic?”
“When you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.”
“For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle.”
“I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another’s company and aid in consultation.”
“Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.”
“Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.”
“That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best – make it all up – but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.”
“Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.”
“I never had to choose a subject – my subject rather chose me.”
“There is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dissect out. It continues and is always valid.”
“We wait always for something that does not come.”
“As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ’forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.”
“Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too much. Because when you make love too much at least you get a damned clarte that is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light.”
“A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death.”
“Practice any faith you wish. Got a ball field up the island where you can practice. I’ll give the Deity a fast one high and inside if he crowds the plate.”
“I did not understand them but they did not have any mystery, and when I understood them they meant nothing to me. I was sorry about this but there was nothing I could do about it.”
“It’s a town you come to for a short time.”
“They arrested us after breakfast.”
“Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”
“Defense is the stronger form with the negative object, and attack the weaker form with the positive object.”
“I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.”
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